Professor Tim Mowl and the Historic Gardens of England Project were featured as the cover article in the Summer 2009 edition of Subtext - the staff magazine of the University of Bristol. This demonstrates the importance and high profile of the project within the academic community. Click here to download and read the article.

A review of one of the recent books in the Historic Gardens of England series, Staffordshire, was published in the Bristol Review of Books in December 2009 and can be read here.

Another profile of the series and Professor Mowl's research appeared in Gardens Illustrated in April 2010.

On 1 January 2007 the Historic Gardens & Landscapes of England project began, with the help of significant and generous additional funding from the Leverhulme Trust; the Leverhulme had already grant aided the previous three books - Cornwall, Worcestershire, Oxfordshire - in the series. This nationwide survey aims to research ten further counties between 2006 and 2012 in order to produce ten more books to add to the six already published. Based at the University of Bristol, the project is led by Professor Timothy Mowl, Director of the Institute of Garden and Landscape History, and his Research Fellow, Dr Clare Hickman. Documentary research in the counties is undertaken by consultants appointed to the project.

The project has attracted national media attention, including an article by Ursula Buchan in the 22 September 2007 edition of The Spectator on 'Mowl's Quest':

"The trick, however, is how to ensure that knowledge of garden history, acquired in academic circles, filters out to the general reader, and there is none better at this than Timothy Mowl, who since 2002 has published six volumes of county garden history in his ‘Historic Gardens of England’ series. Mowl’s approach is rigorously empirical. He is determined to tramp over every piece of uneven grassland and through every bramble-tangled woodland, looking for clues to the intentions of landowners, and the traces of buildings or artificial water, and then going to the documents and maps to see how they tally. Some conventional wisdom has, in the process, been exploded. For example, it is increasingly apparent that there were more people involved in developing the 18th-century ‘landscape garden’ that the quartet of Bridgeman, Kent, Brown and Repton: and moreover, its development was less seamless and more contradictory than earlier generations were led to suppose."